Discussion (76) ¬

Peanut butter… We had a sealed nut policy in my old-school. Anything containing nuts had to be kept in a air tight container and eater in certain locations, we have like seven kids in the school with really bad nut allergy’s so this was the best option outside of banning it.

Man, I know Ashton at the very least needs a good reminder of what his JOB is, but I still can’t help feeling bad for him. He screwed up, he knows it, but he’s also had that little outburst that cost him BIG time. I am far too much of a softie…(thanks, idiot principal of my own youth.)

Mina’s looking far too pleased by all this. She either needs to learn to act better or dial it back a bit. Todd’s an upset parent, but he may be open to calming down if he isn’t egged on. Mina’s already filed that complaint against Principal Ashton and gotten a mea culpa from him regarding the incident. Part of the reason to bring this whole mess up to the school board is to get a more neutral view on everything, and Mina’s looking less neutral by the day.

I got the impression that the look on her face was more because being on that committee gives her a legitimate reason to spend time with Todd without crossing the teacher/parent fraternization boundaries.

Honestly, yes. It looks more like pride in Todd standing up than schadenfreude at Principal Hobbit. Since we know that Mina is capable of recognising and appreciating schadenfreude, her wide-eyed look suggests ‘Yeah, engaged daddies are sexy all right’ more than ‘Mwahaha, my horrible boss is in trouble’. At least to me.

You know, I’m certain we’re about to get some humanizing moment, but at the same time? As a disabled student, I’ve gone through too many school staff who didn’t get why I needed different tools to function on the same level neurotypical students did. I’ve gone through too many teachers who were told by a principal there was nothing to be done and they just had to accept that I would have sensory overload-induced meltdowns almost every day, and spend half the rest of the class reading.

Your job is to ensure students – ALL of your students – have the basic environment and resources they need to function, and you have been too busy covering your own hobbity hindquarters to do that. You have failed them.

My brother has Aspergers. In NJ where I lived they passed a law saying kids with disabilities HAD to be accommodated for. Instead they would make up reasons to send him home. Finally my mother and I put our feet down after the school nurse tried telling us he just had ADHD & to give him ritalin. We had our neurologist write a letter to the school and I (who was in high school) told the principle I would go to the school board meeting and get her fired if she didn’t provide the help my brother needed (i had a few incidents with her when she was MY principle so her attitude was nothing new). My mom could’ve sued them for half a mil at least. But we talked it over & decided taking public money from the school was not good for the students. Instead we settled for a private assigned TA, exemption from things like music class (he couldn’t handle the chaos, I’m sure you know) and to put him on the regular size bus (they had him on the smaller bus & he was made fun of, even though he easily could’ve taken the regular one with my sister).
He went from being suspended from kindergarden to now a successful high school student in advanced math classes making the honor role.
There needs to be an ethics class taught in elementary school because the way people treat others with disorders is atrocious. They are people, they are unique, and they have gifts to share with the world. My brother is amazing and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Thirded. I am moderately to profoundly deaf in both ears, but thanks to my mother being very engaged and ensuring I got good speech therapy very early on and reinforced at home, my speech has only very slight atonality. This tends to even today lead people to disbelieve that my hearing loss is substantial, and throughout my public school career I was isolated, mocked, bullied, by students and faculty alike. One teacher in high school decided that my absences from her class for speech therapy – as set up by the school board – weren’t excusable after all and failed me so that I had to take summer school to make up for it.

I am sure that there are hard-working teachers trying their best to do right by all their students, including the ones with disabilities who cannot perform in the same fashion (in terms of the act of execution, not the potential end quality of their work) as those without disabilities. Unfortunately, they appear to be exceedingly rare, and the number of spiteful adults who choose to make victims out of the otherwise-abled children in their schools are numerous.

The teacher who failed me for missing class was probably the mildest experience I had in the public system. I was grateful to graduate and get the heck out, but looking back years later I’m able to realize how underserved I was.

What I needed: “No, that wasn’t appropriate. I’m going to write down for you how people talk to each other in this kind of situation/model for you how people say ‘I’m done talking’ with their bodies/show you how to look for cues that people want to hang out.”

What I got: Gravel, spit, stuff stolen, pushed down, surrounded and poked, jeered at, put into hatebooks, and on two truly memorable occasions sexually assaulted by peers on school property, in the middle of a bunch of onlookers. I’d been trained, so to speak, not to “complain” by the time of the first sexual assault, because all anybody ever told me was “You need to get along better.” Yeah, great, HOW? By the time of the second, it didn’t matter that the witnesses would never have said anything, because I was old enough to see the end of school ahead and I had found out that reporters will listen to children sometimes, so I decided to be “bad” and “disruptive.” I yelled and hit until the assailant shouted in outrage at my daring to fight him, then told the truth at the top of my lungs to the adults who came running to the source of the noise, and they got rid of him.

Still didn’t bother helping me though. No counseling, no nothing. I’d been sent to counseling, briefly, in between the two assaults, but quit when I peeked at the counselor’s notes and found out that according to him I was “borderline antisocial.” Gee, thanks.

Get in this box, kid. Don’t poke a limb out of it. We need to put the box along with the other boxes on the conveyor belt and keep the belt running. Quit making noise. You’re slowing us down.

Academically I blew the private school graduates out of the water. But my education came with a case of PTSD that dogged me for years.

Precisely the same as mine, actually! Fortunately after we managed to convince the school system to give me a one-on-one aide to help in appropriate-leveled classes, I managed to survive public high school (in a building that didn’t have walls that went all the way to the ceiling… man I hate that place), but it was an uphill fight to get the county to accept it. Fortunately, we had a very good advocate and my parents get like the wrath of a vengeful god when someone tries to mess with their children.

Extra fortunately, my case ended up helping the county policy be rewritten entirely. But getting it enforced is still a struggle sometimes, and it sucks that that burden falls on the parents when it’s so often a time and money sink.

My wife was put in classes with mentally disabled kids because she has Nystagmus. She was a piss poor high school student largely because the system didn’t know how to or cared enough to handle her issues. (She just needed help with notes on the blackboard and to be allowed to sit up front)

She made the honor roll when she got her Bachelor’s degree and barely missed the honor roll when she got her Masters. I expect she’ll make it again when she gets her Doctorate. :p

The first day of my 7th grade Extended Learning Program homeroom class, we students listened to the teacher with an increasingly surreal feeling. When he opened the question period, we started asking him about making mobiles and doing advanced algebra and stuff. He had been talking about verbalizing feelings and circle time.

And that was how he found out that he had been hired for the brainy kids’ program on the strength of his credentials as a teacher of the emotionally disturbed. Same line item, same diff, right?

So you’re in favor of segregation? But that’s a step back. What the government is trying to do is integrate Sarnothi into the rest of the country rather than keeping them confined into such a limited space.

Selkie, and other Sarnoth peoples, are all refugees. They came seeking freedom. What you’re technically suggesting with the segregation, is that the Sarnoth people be forbidden to join the rest of society simply because they’re different.

And yes, school is part of society. If Selkie and other Sarnoth people are segregated in school, it wouldn’t be too long before it spills over into everything else. Which is what the story is trying to get past, and make it so that humans and Sarnoth peoples can interact with one another on a large scale, thus offering more freedoms.

Removing the non-human element. Selkie’s differences are basically this: She looks different, has eating restrictions, and has thermal requirements. Dozens of children go to school every day with one or more of all three of these issues. And they function just fine. There’s literally no reason for Selkie to be pulled out of this school (where her friends are) to be placed in another one.

Back to the non-human issues. Selkie doesn’t live in the places where there are more Sarnothi. So she’d simply be put in a different human school where she knows absolutely no one and therefore she’d be treated worse than she is here. Here, at least, she does have friends who can tell other kids that Selkie isn’t a monster. At this school, she’s not totally alone. And one of her teachers already knew her when she got here this year.

So to say that Selkie shouldn’t be in THIS school makes no sense whatsoever. Not even if you remove the non-human element.

She doesn’t have an anger-control issue (which might be a reasonable criteria for a special school). That she is capable of doing above-average damage to others is on par with, I suppose, having a long-term communicable disease such as Hepatitis or HIV. Students who are too young to understand the danger their condition poses to others are still allowed to go to school, with the adults around them responsible for addressing any issues that might arise, because the chance of passing the ailment to another student is pretty low (requires, what, a bloody nose (or other bloody injury) and another student to start messing with the blood while having a cut on their hand?). And that’s with an incurable communicable disease; this is just irritating saliva and sharper-than-average teeth.

I don’t think he’s being xenophobic. Although I don’t think that Selkie should be segregated, I do sympathize with his points.

Many people seem to believe that “Treating Different People Differently” is synonymous with “Intolerance”. Yet there ARE some differences between people so profound that no amount of good will or benevolence can solve the issues they create. (i.e., men being naturally stronger than women.)

Yes, we all have the potential to kill dozens of people whenever we drive a car. (several tons of metal moving at 40mph can inflict a LOT of harm.) However, children often lack the restraint of adults, and Selkie does have the ability to seriously harm or outright kill any student on a whim with FAR greater efficiency than a pencil or a scissors used as a weapon. And she WILL be tempted to hurt students who antagonize her, (kids antagonize each other; it’s part of being a kid) especially if the adults don’t support her. (because she was the instigator, ect.) Simply ignoring this concern is irresponsible to both Selkie and the children she goes to school with.

In Selkie’s case, I believe segregation is unwarranted and far more trouble than it’s worth, but simply suggesting segregation as a viable option isn’t xenophobic or intolerant; merely realistic. To be truly considerate to the subject in question, ALL solutions should at least be considered.

Men aren’t very much naturally stronger than women, if at all. That’s socialization, not inherent ability. We encourage little boys to run around and do sports much more than we do little girls, especially once they start hitting puberty. We channel boys into sports that showcase raw strength more often, while channeling girls into sports that require more agility and less raw strength.

When women join the military in Britain, they tend to start far behind the men in terms of strength. They catch up with some specialized training (weak men get the same training). By the end of boot camp, men and women have comparable strength scores. The very strongest man is probably stronger than the very strongest woman, but in terms of general population the difference is nonexistent.

Suggesting segregation because someone could be dangerous, even though all evidence suggests she isn’t, is xenophobic. Do you think a kid taking jiu jitsu classes should also potentially be segregated, because ze can kill people with hir hands and feet?

@M
First of all, I never said I supported segregation, only that there shouldn’t be a knee-jerk reaction towards considering every option.

Also, as I stated further below, Selkie’s claws are apparently as sharp as needles, and dexterous enough to pluck a goldfish’s eyeball from it’s socket. If she gets into a scuffle with another kid, or simply gets overenthusiastic during gym class, she could rake someone’s eyes by accident, or slash someone’s throat…

Again, segregation is not the answer, but simply dismissing the potential harm she might cause is irresponsible, not only the other students at the school, but also towards Selkie herself.

Umm, human’s saliva is not that great either. Bite from humans can get pretty damn septic, especially if the human in question is not so great in the dental hygine department. https://www.zocdoc.com/answers/9855/is-a-human-bite-dangerous. Some humans have fangs (I have a fanged tooth). Sorry, but you have not convinced me that Selkie is more risky to the student body than Truck, who like his name is about roughly the same size as one and has no qualms about slamming a kid into a wall, or Amanda, who is shown to have a very violent temper.

As a person that did get segregated by the other kids in every school I went to, and because of moving, there was a lot of schools, I can tell you that your plan would only exasperate the situation.

It creates resentment and anger. And with Selkie’s gifts, that is not a good thing. It built up enough rage that I snapped and hurt two kids really badly and I still struggle with trust issues and misanthropic views.

It would be better to once a week have someone sit down and talk and discuss things with her, let her vent and let go while also teaching her ways to defend herself without the use of claws or venom so if she get’s put against the wall again she again chooses something that isn’t lethal.

Also. Just because someone has the potential to be dangerous, doesn’t mean we should lock them up. If that were the case, we should ALL be imprisoned, and all kids should be quarantined, because we ALL have the capacity to be dangerous.

There are different degrees of danger a person can present. A thug with a gun is far more dangerous than a kid with a sharpened pencil, the same way that a kid with claws is far more likely to cause a serious injury than one who doesn’t.

Selkie’s claws are dextrous and sharp enough to pluck a goldfish’s eyes from it’s socket. If she gets into a scuffle at school, and one of those claws presses against her rivals neck just a little too hard…

I’m not saying she should be booted out of her school. Her integration into the school may be complicated, but it’s far from impossible. Nevertheless, To simply IGNORE the danger she might pose is just asking for trouble.

If the school didn´t have a culture of unrestricted bullying, caused by the principal´s refusal to do anything at all about bullying, Selkie´s special traits wouldn´t be any problem at all.

Look at the last pages: It seems like nearly all the kids of the parents at the PTA have to deal with being bullied. That isn´t “shit happens, kids will be kids”, this is a major problem. And at least some of these kids seem to get beaten up regularly.

I was bullied in school, too, for years, and what little the teachers did to address the namecalling and harassment had very little effect… BUT they drew a line at physical violence or the threat thereof. THAT was dealt with quickly and decisively whenever they found out about it. Principal Hobbit, on the other hand, refuses to do anything at all.

What´s the situation? Selkie is restricted in her choice of lunch and in her outdoor activities in colder weather; neither of which is any argument for keeping her out a public school if the staff are aware of her needs. Selkie will always be called “fishface” and such by other students, and she and Todd need to be aware that, for all the attempts to stop it, the teachers won´t be able to do so completely; that is probably the price she´ll have to pay to go to school with her friends. But the school´s refusal to address the problem of endemic violence by bullies against other kids is NOT an excuse to kick the victim out of school.

He also made sure that any student not saintly enough to bend over and take it without ever defending themselves will get into the same kind of trouble as the bullies. And, let´s face it, if you don´t lie on the ground, limp as a ragdoll, there´s always *something* that can be interpreted as you defending yourself.

I had the great fortune that at my school, they at least didn´t tolerate physical violence or threats thereof. One kid drew a paring knife on me after cooking class to get my lunch money; I told a teacher about it the next day, and all hell broke loose for him. Turned out he´d been extorting and blackmailing students for some time, and several students reported on it more or less simultaneously.

So, while middle school wasn´t exactly a pleasure cruise for me, at least I didn´t have to deal with being beaten up.

Yes, Smeagol was initially reacting to the knowledge of Trunchy’s past responses.
He stopped being able to just point at that when he 1. fired teachers without obeying regulations on these things and 2. made the victim-blaming sort of comments that he made during the previous strip.

You know, between this and the GPS tracking chips, that would sort of explain the enthusiasm of the other parents – “finally, a suggestion that isn´t utterly insane and concerns a problem that actually exists”.

I know, right? I was HOME SCHOOLED and we had to deal with those loons. There was this odd perception that home schooling parents were some how smarter at one point. Nope, turns out even the crazies can be concerned about their kids education too. Planning a home school group graduation ceremony was almost a jail-worthy disaster until someone with sense suggested letting the graduating teens plan it instead.

God I was in elementary school before they fully had a diagnosis on Aspergers, and when I was tested three medical facilities one of them accredited as one of the best in the country, put me as ADD instead of Aspergers. Suffice to way while I thankfully had supportive teachers in elementary school, and thankfully my folks were not convinced I had ADD and seeing as the ritalin just sapped my appetite and made me drowsy they took me off of that within a month or two. A family friend who was a psychiatrist and a damn nice guy was the one who got it right and suggested to my folks I had aspergers. Sure enough once the symptoms started to become medically known years later I hit plenty of the keys plus one more bit of testing confirmed it.

Middle school and the first two years of high school however, I ran into all sorts of teachers who were ill-equipped to accommodate even kids with ADD/ADHD much less Aspergers; one even labelled me as stupid. Well my Mom let her have it (politely but still shoved it in her face I wasn’t a ‘problem child’ that I had Aspergers and if she had paid attention my Mother made sure the facility was aware of this to inform my teachers. Either the school messed up or she didn’t pay attention but she thankfully backed off).

And my first high school, well place was too big, too many teachers just making ends meet and still just not a good atmosphere for anyone who had focusing issues, or needed plain as f*ck visual cues or he got confused; and the occasional chaos/too much loud noise causing me to lose focus/zone out to get my zen back.

Thankfully halfway through sophomore year I changed schools, then went to a private one for my final two years. I still had trouble but the teachers were much better at giving me some hands on help if I got stuck. Sadly some of the damage was done and I was turned off to the entire institution of learning. Part of it admittedly is my own bias, but these days I advocate changing the entire set up of the school systems since frankly they don’t work anymore and feel like prisons that take up eight hours of the day and then leave you with too much homework to do anything else.

If I hadn’t been so good at losing myself in a (text)book, I couldn’t have hacked school. As it was I graduated with honors. Not super duper honors, of course, because only people who can do social get the super duper honors, but I got scholarships.

But man, lab classes were hell. They were the only classes where screwing around being “funny” was strictly not allowed, but they were still hell, because how to social?

I was great at losing myself in books (couldn’t hear worth spit – but I could read like nobody’s business ;P). Unfortunately, labs weren’t a safe zone for me – there were three kids who’d take turns hitting me in the back of the head, calling me names, etc. Ah well. High school ended more than 20 years ago, and now I’m back in college and discovering that I can, in fact, do math and science just fine, in an environment which is interested in education. (I wouldn’t describe differential calculus as EASY, but it’s not the horrible ravenous bugblatter beast of Tra’al, either.)

I’ve already decided if I have kids, to home-school. My case was a bit similar to yours and Jenny Islander’s – socializing was difficult (not hearing well is a big social barrier, especially at that age) and the school administrations typically wanted to treat me as mentally disadvantaged. It took til late middle school for my mother to manage to force them to test me for the gifted program – they didn’t want to. When I qualified, they tried to make sure I’d fail the gifted classes so they could put me back in the corner, more or less.

It’s weird, isn’t it, how anything that marks you as ‘different from ordinary’, they tend to want to also classify as ‘stupid’?

Still, please consider registering your hypothetical children as homeschoolers through your local school district, if that option is available. You get to sort of handle the district with long tongs–use the services you’re paying taxes for, avoid most of the crap. Also you can use a student-sized chunk of the school budget to buy textbooks and materials.

Or that may only be the case in Alaska. Or just in my district. When you start homeschooling, it becomes clear that education in America is a crazy quilt.

Washington state here – they try to make things as difficult as possible, the teachers’ union is very powerful here and kind of evil to would-be home-schoolers. Since right now I’m not even pregnant, I have time to try to work out the bugs. (One of those bugs is working on getting my science degree including post-calculus math as that’s one of the things they tend to use to smack kids into the system; not a lot of parents can prove to the state they’re qualified on the math!)

Huh. Here they just have the parents submit 3 progress reports per year, including math samples, and take the same standardized tests (proctored by school staff) as the in-facility students. Seems to work fine at turning up issues that might require a tutor.

Also students can take community college classes (for college credit!!!) starting at 14. Including math.

I would take that in a HEARTBEAT over what Texas does. Which is nothing. You tell the district you plan to homeschool and that’s it. They never check on the kid ever again.

And, quite frankly, most parents aren’t qualified to teach their children math or science (or history or economics or literature or foreign languages or art or art history or music or music history or civics/government … really most people aren’t qualified to teach anything at a high school level), so of course the district “gets them” on it. It’s a deficiency most people suffer from. Children have the right to an education; parents do not have the right to deny them an education based on the parents’ blind spots.

Oh yeah and on the bullying issues… had my own share of it and while I am glad it’s become a headline issues these days, I feel it should have always been a priority, as several of my friends and myself may not have had one more thing jading us about going to school. To any and all schools that aren’t taking bullying problems seriously, then to hell with you, and I hope you all get fired.

Is it just me, or does that fourth panel look like Todd is holding her jaw?

Yeah, bullying was always a problem for me, but it came mostly from the girls. I had ADD, Bipolar and various behavioral issues stemming from problems at home and PTSD. I was suicidal at 6, and stated developing sexually quite early, so there was almost no end to it, though I never wound up in the hospital (except that once for the broken wrist)./ But even when that happened, rather than help me, the kids all laughed. And I remember once that the entire bus was chanting (my name) sucks over and over again (including the bus driver).

Nowadays they have more stuff in place that prevents that kind of thing from happening but I agree with y’all, it’s far from perfect. Lots of crap still sifts through the cracks. So I hope Todd and everyone do some good in the future with this motion.

I was thinking the same thing. Todd’s size is throwing off the perspective. His hand indicates he is supposed to be in the foreground but his size in comparison to the people he’s talking to (and their facing, unless everyone is doing the “looking in the distance while talking” thing at the same time) implies he’s in the foreground.

Hooray! The terrible man who did an injustice to your daughter because he thought he was going to lose his job if he didn’t, and in fact the only reason he didn’t get Trunchbull on his case was because Selkie broke even more rules to gather evidence! So, in a way, the principal was going to lose his job either way! But now he’s going to lose his job here!

Hooray! The terrible man who for years has allowed an atmosphere of severe bullying continue unchecked will have to face the consequences of his actions!

The bullying existed BEFORE Truck/the Trunchbulls arrived at the school, note the comments the other parents are stating, such as children frequently going home crying, and physical abuse (being beaten up). It’s not just the Trunchbulls, he’s been allowing this abusive behavior to run, unchecked, for quite a while.

I absolutely love the conversation going on in the background of the last panel.
And oddly, I do think I heard somewhere about peanuts helping brain function…I think it had something to do with fatty acids?